This July 2015 I travelled to the Red Hat office in Brno, Czech Republic to spend some time with my teammates there, and I managed to get a lot of reading done between long plane rides and being jet lagged for many nights :) So I finally managed to finish up some of the books that had been lingering on my ToDo list and even managed to finally read a few of the books that together make up the Chronicles of Narnia, since I had never read them as a kid.

All Quiet on the Western Front takes the prize for being one of the best books I have ever read! I felt that the way WWI was presented through the eyes of the main character was a great way to represent all the pain, angst and suffering that all sides of conflict went through, without catering for any particular side or having an agenda. Erich Maria Remarque's style had me some times breathless, some times with a knot on the pit of my stomach I as 'endured' the many life changing events that took place in the book. Is this an action-packed book about WWI? Will it read like a thriller? In my opinion, even though there are many chapters with gory details about killings and battles, the answer is a very bland 'maybe'. I think that the real 'star' of this book is its philosophical view of the war and how the main characters, all around 19-20 years of age, learn to deal with its life lasting effects.

Now, I have been a huge fan of Ray Bradbury for a while now, and when I got The October Country for my birthday last month, I just knew that it would be time well spent reading it. For those of you who are more acquainted his science fiction works, this book will surprise you as it shows you a bit of his 'darker' side. All of the short stories included in this collection deal with death, mysterious apparitions, inexplicable endings and are sure to spook you a little bit.

Cryptonomicon was at times slow, some other times funny and, especially toward the end, a very entertaining book. Weighing in at a hefty 1000 pages (depending on the edition you have, plus/minus 50 odd pages), this book covers two different periods in the lives of a number of different characters, past (around WWII) and present, all different threads eventually leading to a great finale. Alternating between past and present, the story takes us to the early days of how cryptology was 'officially invented' and used during the war, and how many of the events that took place back then were affecting the lives of some of the direct descendants of the main characters in our present day. As you go through the back and forth you start to gather bits and pieces of information that eventually connects all the dots of an interesting puzzle. It definitely requires a long term commitment to go though it, but it was enjoyable and, as I mention before, it made me laugh at many places.

Those of you who know me know that I am a huge book reader and spend most of my free time reading several books at the same time. One could say that reading is one of my passions, and having wasted so many years after high school completely ignoring this passion (in exchange for spending most of my time trying to learn about Linux, get an education, a job and, let's be frank, chasing after girls), I decided that something had to be done about it, and starting around 2008 I 'forced' myself to dedicate at least one solid hour of reading for fun every day.

I find it funny to say that I had to force myself, but this statement is very much true. Being so used to spending all of my time sitting in front of a computer and getting flooded with information every single minute of the day (IRC, Twitter, Facebook, commit emails, RSS feeds, etc), I found it difficult to 'unplug' and spend time doing nothing but focusing on only one thing. I was so used to multitasking and being constantly bombarded with lots of information that sitting quietly and reading didn't feel very productive to me... sad but true.

Anyhow, after several 'agonizing' months of getting up from my desk and making a point of turning off my cel phone and finding a quiet place somewhere in the building (or at home during the weekends), I finally got into the habit of reading for pleasure. I actually looked forward to these reading periods (imagine that, huh?) and eventually I realized that if I skipped this 'ritual' even one day, my days felt like they got longer and I felt stressed out and irritable for the remaining of the day. Reading became not only a good habit but my mechanism for relaxing and recharging my energies during the day!

Well, this passion and appetite for reading has only gotten bigger, and with time I have to say that it has become a pretty big part of who I am today! In a way I am happy that it took me this long to get back into the habit of reading... I mean, I feel that getting older was an important part of preparing myself so that I could really appreciate John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury and the likes of them! Would I have truly appreciated The Grapes of Wrath when I was younger? Perhaps... but it took me around 40 years to get to it and I'm happy that when it did I was able to appreciate this amazing piece of art!

These last few months I decided that I wanted to start tracking all the books that I read, buy or receive as a gift every month (see my reading progress on GoodReads and add me as a friend), and jot down some of my impressions and motives for reading or buying them. Those familiar with Nick Hornby will probably associate this post (and hopefully others that will surely come) with the work he has done writing for the Believer Magazine ... and this would be correct. My intention is not to copy his style or anything like that, but I thought that the format he chose to report on his own reading 'adventures' would fit in quite nicely with what I wanted to get across to my readers... and I'm sticking with the format as long as it works for me :)

For my last post of 2014 I wanted to show, with pictures, the books I
read and spent so much time with this year.

Back in January of 2014 I set out to read 30 books as part of my
Reading
Challenge.
I wanted to focus on reading Brazilian authors early on as I felt that I
really needed to learn more about Brazilian literature and this time,
read books for fun and not because I was told to back when I was much
younger.

Making a quick pit stop to mark this milestone in my professional
career: today is my 3-year anniversary at Red Hat! Time has certainly
flown by and I really cannot believe that it has been three years since
I joined this company.

I know it is sort of cliche to say "I can not believe that it has been
this long..." and so on and so forth, but it is so true. Back then I
joined a relatively new project with very high ambitions, and the first
few months had me swimming way out in the deepest part of the pool,
trying to learn all 'Red Hat-things' and Clojure for the existing
automation framework (now we are fully using Python).

Woke up this morning and, as usual, sat down to read the Books
section of The New York Times while drinking my coffee. This has
become sort of a 'tradition' for me and because of it I have been able
to learn about many interesting books, some of which I would not have
found out on my own. I also 'blame' this activity to turning my
nightstand into a mini-library on its own.

Background

It was around 2005 when I started doing translations for Free and
Open-Source Software. Back then I was warmly welcomed to the Ubuntu
family and quickly learned all there was to know about using their
Rosetta online tool to translate and/or review existing translations for
the Brazilian Portuguese language. I spent so much time doing it, even
during working hours, that eventually I sort of "made a name for myself"
and made my way up to the upper layers of the Ubuntu Community echelon.

Then I "graduated" and started doing translations for the upstream
projects, such as GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, and Openbox. I took on more
responsabilities, learned to use Git and make commits for myself as well
as for other contributors, and strived to unify all Brazilian Portuguese
translations across as many different projects as possible. Many
discussions were had, (literally) hundreds of hours were spent going
though also hundreds of thoundands of translations for hundreds of
different applications, none of it bringing me any monetary of financial
advantage, but all done for the simple pleasure of knowing that I was
helping make FOSS applications "speak" Brazilian Portuguese.

My parents were eagerly awaiting our arrival on an early Spring morning,
and when our plane finally landed after the almost 10 1/2 hours flight
and we made our way to the luggage claim area, the reunion was filled
with a lot of hugging, laughter and a huge sigh ...

Today I'm releasing FauxFactory 0.2.0 with a new feature, a "Lorem
Ipsum" generator. I confess that I did not look around for any existing
implementation in python out there and just started writing code. My
idea was to create a method that would: